Food Fight 'Critters' Try To Take Kansas Out To Lunch

April 27, 1986|By Joe Bob Briggs

Critters just shot to Numero Uno on the Best of '86 Drive-In Movie Stud List, thanks to the title-role performance by man-eating porcupine tumbleweeds with enormous teeth. These are the best intergalactic monsters since Zsa Zsa Gabor starred in Queen of Outer Space -- and they wear a lot less makeup.

What we got here is an outer-space prison ship, where the death-row inmates, the Krites, get loose, steal a spaceship, and head for Grovers Bend, Kan., to munch on the population. So to head off disaster, the outer-space king sends a couple of bounty hunters to blow the Krites away, and all the way to Earth they watch Empty-V on their monitors, and so right before they get there, one of the bounty hunters turns hisself into a Mick Jagger lookalike and threatens to do entire scenes from Let's Spend the Night Together. Anyhow, by the time these two turkeys get to Kansas, the porky-weeds are already feeding on Auntie Ems all over the lot, and they got four of the top-billed stars of the movie holed up in a house that looks like every room was 'specially designed by Michael Landon to reflect his hairdo.

After eating a deputy sheriff and a dork from New York, the Krites start trying to make a Billy Green Bush sandwich -- and the family revolts! Pretty soon we got a kid named Scott Grimes throwin' his homemade firecracker bombs into their mouths, and the horny little family porkchop, Nadine Van Der Velde, trying to avenge her dead boyfriend with a pitchfork. Meantime, the bounty hunters accidentally demolish the Methodist church with a stolen cop car, but that's nothin' compared to what really makes the town mad -- they shoot up the bowling alley! On League Night!

Pretty soon everbody ends up out at the Brown Farm, equipped with shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, and it's time to boogie.

Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Dee Wallace Stone, as the mother, for whining, as usual; M. Emmet Walsh, as the sheriff, for being M. Emmet Walsh; Scott Grimes, as the kid who takes on the critters, for saying, ''I don't know, I must've been thrown clean out of my room by the earthquake''; Stephen Herek, for directing and writing and hiring all the same guys who worked on Android; Nadine Van Der Velde, for making the sign of the twin- pronged alfalfa plow with a guy from New York in the hay barn and watching him get munched into a furry Frito; and Billy Green Bush, as the farmer, for saying: ''These things are vicious! They've cut out our phone, they've cut out our power, it's only a matter of time till they get in here!''